We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” –George Orwell, Animal Farm
The Internet Copyright Wars are in their third decade, and despite the billions of dollars and trillions of phosphors spilled on its battlegrounds around the world, precious little progress has been made. A quarter of a century after Napster’s founding, we’re still haunted by the same false binaries that have deadlocked us since the era of 56k modems:
- Team User v. Team Creator. Creators are users, and not merely because “everything is a remix.” Creative labor builds on the works that came before it. “Genre” is just another word for “works that share a common set of touchstones, norms and assumptions.”
- Big Tech v. Big Content. Entertainment monopolies aren’t staunch defenders of the creative workers whose labors generate their profits (far from it!) and tech giants aren’t selfless liberators of oppressed artists stuck sharecropping for legacy entertainment companies (not by a long chalk!). No matter whether a giant multinational is a member of the MPA or TechNet, it has the same overriding imperative: to reduce its wage bill and thus retain more earnings for its shareholde
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